How RSS Works
// April 24th, 2007 // Site News
I’ve had several people I know look at me like I’m a green Martian when I tell them they should get my blog by RSS Feed. “Huh? What’s that?” they say. Allow me to explain briefly.
RSS is an acronym that stands for “Real Simple Syndication”. An RSS feed is basically just a small .xml page that contains a list of articles and other content from the website. It usually will contain headings, post dates, images, etc as well. This page can be read by an RSS Reader. Whenever the site is updated, the RSS Feed is updated as well. You can collect feeds from all your favorite sites in your reader. Then you have all your favorite web content right there in one place. You know when your favorite sites have been updated, and often you don’t even have to visit the site at all! It’s your Favorites/Bookmarks on steroids.
I don’t have an RSS Reader.
Yes you do. You just don’t know it. There are TONS of them on the web.
Google Reader is probably the most popular (and the best). I use Netvibes for my browser start page, so it’s more convenient for me to use that for my RSS Feeds (Netvibes ROCKS, by the way). Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox also have built in RSS Readers. There are also RSS Readers that you can install on your computer as programs.
Almost every website out there these days has a free RSS feed available (especially blogs). It’s a great way to keep up with your favorite sites. If you haven’t discovered RSS yet, get on it! It will change the way you use the internet.
To get started, first find a reader and install it/open your account. Then go to your favorite website and look for the link to the RSS feed. It’s usually accompanied by an image like the one at the top of this post.
You can start with the feed from this blog. I provide two options here. You can get it by RSS Reader or by email. Look in the sidebar on the right under “Subscription” for those links. I also have RSS links in the header up top.
[tags]rss, rss reader, Google Reader, rss feed[/tags]
I love RSS feeds. You can browse your favorite blogs right in your favorite/bookmark menu. Thanks for the how-to. Hey, what is technorati? And thanks for putting me on your blogroll! I never realized I would enjoy blogs so much.
Isn’t blogging addictive? I think I have a problem… ;-)
Technorati is what’s called a “blog aggregator” site. They pull together content from blogs all over the web. It’s searchable like Google, but when you search a topic you only get blog results. It also has a rating system and tags so it’s really easy to find new high quality blogs to read.
To get your blog listed, you just sign up for a free account and then “claim” your blog. There are other aggregators out there, but Technorati is probably the biggest.
It took a little time, but now I’m starting to see some traffic to my site because of it.
nice post !!
[...] I took the time to learn about feeds and things. Ben at Ben’s Soapbox has a good article on How RSS Works. Again, MamaBlogga has great advice on why you should offer full feeds to your [...]